The authors explore the hypothesis that high home-ownership damages the labor market. The results are relevant to, and may be worrying for, a range of policymakers and researchers. The authors find that rises in the home-ownership rate in a US state are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in...

This study explores the hypothesis that high home-ownership damages the labor market. We show that rises in the home-ownership rate in a U.S. state are a precursor to eventual sharp rises in unemployment in that state. The elasticity exceeds unity: a doubling of the rate of home-ownership in a...

This paper examines the amount of slack in the UK labor market. It examines the downward adjustments made by the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to both unemployment and underemployment, which in our view are invalid. Without any evidence the MPC in its assessment of the output gap reduces the...

Four million Native Americans who identify as single race live in the USA. Another three million identify as Native American in combination with another race. Yet they are rarely the focus of detailed research. We provide the first evidence that levels of consistently poor mental health, or...

In this paper we compare the changing pattern of unionization in OECD countries, review existing evidence, and present new information on cross-country differences in union-nonunion differentials in labor market outcomes, largely from the micro data files of the International Social Survey...

I present information on self-employment from seventy countries. Self-employment rates are generally down across the OECD. The main exceptions are the UK, and New Zealand. The probability of being self-employed across the OECD is higher for men and for older workers compared with younger...

We examine the impact on the UK of the influx of workers from Eastern Europe. We look at the characteristics of the workers who have come to the UK since 2004. We also use data from a number of Eurobarometers 2004-2007 as well as the 2005 Work Orientation module International Social Survey...

National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society&apos's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for "unpleasant" or "undesirable", which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country evidence on...